OUTSOURCING quality of the software code that our outsourcer produces depends greatly on the quality of the specs and requirements that we supply to says McDonald. began by being much too casual about the requirements, and we suffered as a result. If you have clear specs, you going to get good Putting the right work with the right partners. we first started outsourcing, we thought have one partner for everything we outsourced, but we learned that a recipe for says Kehling. we find a best-in-class provider for a particular project?facilities is different from print management and so forth?and hire our outsourcer Part of this effort involves rightsizing your outsourcing needs, which means making adjustments when time to add or subtract resources as your business grows or contracts. wanted a more flexible solution than Oracle on Demand offered says Larry Campbell, vice president of information management and technology for Development Alternatives Inc., in Washington, D.C. DAI has used Navisite for its outsourced hosted Oracle applications and Virtustream for outsourced data center business-continuity purposes. The company picked Navisite and initially cut its costs in half. Part of rightsizing is understanding what your actual needs are?whether you are outsourcing your infrastructure or your technical skills. managers find it difficult to delegate anything to somebody down the hall, let alone in another state or says Campbell. probably the right people to manage projects, especially projects that use outsourced offshore technical resources. a custom application development project, for example, can be challenging. You need clear instructions throughout, and you must have developers with more than just the ability to code. have found that DBAs [database administrators] and consultants who support our Oracle EBS [E-Business Suite] applications have worked very well when outsourced overseas. I believe the result of the defined set of tasks required to support those systems and technologies. When we need creativity and flexibility, when we run into Allow your outsourcer to fail often and quickly. Part of this process involves putting in place checkpoints that are frequent enough to evaluate progress, and ensuring that the outsourcing team is on the right track. sure you can learn from your failures, says Chanezon. we were building the test for our Checkout API with Globant, they could have done a very lengthy design process of a few months. Instead, we had daily discussions, and it took them just a week to put together a basic prototype of the testing framework that we could build every day. Since we could detect failures early, we got further ahead and were able to explore a lot of different When hired Xerox to manage its enterprise printers, Xerox was in the process of building its Enterprise Print Services management tool so that any employee could print a document to any printer across the enterprise. assumed that all our printers had to be on the same physical network, but we pushed them to make their tool work across multiple says Kehling. Since implementing this tool, has printed million fewer pages and cut costs by 21 percent by replacing desktop printers with more efficient workgroup printers. DAI also has frequent checkpoints with its outsourcer, Navisite. team does weekly status meetings with them to make sure that the right things are happening, and there are daily e-mails and phone says Campbell. Find the win-win. have to make the entire pie bigger, but not at the expense of my outsourcing says Kehling. get a winwin without thinking of your outsourcer as a Is the A-team in place? Do you have your best people managing the outsourcer, and do they have the best team working on your project? years ago, we had some issues with our says FCI McDonald. were losing about a third of the team supporting us each year. attract and keep the talent. We kept 10 or so from the beginning, but the rest of the organization was turning over rapidly. We develop them quickly enough, and, by the time we finally did, they would leave and go choose an offshore outsourcer that is too far or too many time zones away. One of the issues with having Oracle On Demand as an outsourcer for DAI was that the company offered a the sun strategy for their Campbell recalls. were never talking to the same person twice when we called with a problem. with Navisite, we deal with the same people, and they know our history, so we have a lot of continuity. We save a lot of time by not having to repeatedly review our One of the reasons Google went with Globant was because it was in South America and had working hours that coincided better with headquarters staff. Managing outsourcing involves a delicate balance among various factors, including personnel, costs, geography and culture. By using some of these suggestions, you should be able to avoid the pitfalls and enjoy the benefits of outsourcing. Please send your comments and questions on this TechKnow article to editors@baselinemag.com. WWW.BASELINEMAG.COM BASELINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2010